Scirocco wouldn't have been much of an inspiration if I hadn't decided to incorporate some of it in something else, would it?

When I first came up with these games, I thought of Scirocco as the main event, and Typhoon as a sideshow. After playing with them both for a long time, I think the reverse is true; Typhoon (if you have the patience) is the better game. At least, it is if you like variety: because there are so many piece types, and because each piece promotes differently, and because the promoted pieces are so different from one another, it seems as if every endgame is different—almost like a different game entirely.

This game has a lot of Chu Shogi in it, as you'll notice if you look at the arrays for each game. The Japanese figured out a long time ago that it wasn't necessary for pieces to have symmetrical moves in order to have a good game—allowing asymmetry greatly increases the space of pieces you can choose from, which means you can better fine-tune piece values and piece interactions.

The new Typhoon ZRF doesn't seem to be in the index yet, but if you have Zillions and are impatient, it's here.

I've been thinking that too many Typhoon endgames wind up with a Genie.

The whole point of a big game like this is the feeling of surprise-within-familiarity. One game of Typhoon should be enough like another that you feel you can learn the game well enough to master it, but games shouldn't be so alike that you get the been-there-done-that feeling on a regular basis.

(If you just like novelty for its own sake, you can just play smaller games. The game invention rate at this site appears to be on the order of one a day, and most are smaller than Typhoon.)

Anyway, I've been conducting an experiment that weakens the Salamander: it can't move more than one space unless it ends adjacent to a friendly piece. So far, this seems to be having the desired effect of reducing the frequency of Salamanders promoting to Genies (the Salamander used to charge unescorted deep into the promotion zone in many games). The few endgames I've checked so far use a greater variety of promoted pieces than I saw in the past.

I'll probably settle on this rule change, but I'll try it out for a little longer first.

> I suggest the Salamander move as a Q3 that must approach a piece whenever it moves.

That's another interesting possibility.

I think the move I settled on is better for what I was trying to do, which was to keep the Salamander as a good defensive piece while reducing its ability to promote. I assume your formulation lets the piece move when it lands next to a piece of either color along its line of movement. This means there's just one direction in which the enabling piece (should we call it a 'screen', by analogy with hopping pieces, even though it's in the wrong place?) can be located, as opposed to 7 in my version, so your Salamander would be less powerful overall. If your screen could be an opposing piece as well as a friendly piece, that means (other things being equal) that your Salamander would be able to make an approach-constrained move about 2/7 as often as mine, and might be less inhibited about moving into enemy territory, because the opponent would typically have a number of pieces that could not capture the adjacent Salamander.

I might use your rule elsewhere, though. I have long thought that the Jupiter Hooklet and Hawklet might be overpowered for that game (I can't really tell until I have some software capable of playing the game). One way to throttle them down would be to make the second parts of their moves conditional on an approach. In their case, because their promotions are not as strong as a Genie, there would be less reason to discourage them from moving toward the promotion zone.

The fact that you can so readily come up with a different, but still easily understood, rule of movement for a piece worth less than a Rook should cheer the folks at the ShortRange project. There is still a very large space of interesting pieces for them to explore.

> How about it moves like a Q, but must jump over a friendly piece on every step bar the last?

That is another interesting piece. Not short-range in the sense that is has a fixed distance (less than the width of the board) beyond which it cannot go, but short-range because it would usually be impractical to create a long bridge of friendly pieces to the destination. Much harder for it to get boxed in than an ordinary Commoner, so worth more. Is it worth as much as a Rook?

What other types of movement are there that are situationally short-range?

I think I like the Salamander the way I've made it now. The goal is not to keep changing Typhoon indefinitely, but to get the game into a fixed form that has the specific feel I've been aiming for.

That said, there is always the question of which pieces will go into the next game in the series beyond Jupiter.

Undertaker

The description of the Undertaker says it promotes to the Knightrider. I believe this is incorrect -- judging from the description of the Knightrider and the Dayrider, it should say the Undertaker promotes to the Dayrider.